Online electronic transactions between users and service providers are common today because of the widespread usage of the Internet. A service provider for online electronic transactions typically scales up its data processing capability and network infrastructure to handle the increased load as the number of users grows. Some services experience fluctuation of usage resulting in cyclic peak and idle time periods during a given day, a given month, or a given year.
Such cyclic peak and idle time periods are not confined to the networking world. In fact, the problem is pervasive throughout the real world. For example, a highway gets congested during rush hours, while it is largely free of traffic at midnight. A department store has peak customer traffic during holiday seasons. The same store typically has low traffic on a weekday morning.
In case of the highway example, a car pool lane can be introduced to alleviate congestion during the rush hours by reducing the number of cars on the road. In case of the department store example, the store might scale up its customer handling capability by hiring temporary seasonal workers to accommodate the peak customer traffic during the holiday seasons.
An example of a typical cyclical Internet service is an online tax filing service. Network and data processing equipment experiences the highest traffic and load before a tax filing deadline, such as April 15th in any given year. The online tax filing service provider invests a significant amount of capital in network and data processing infrastructure to satisfy this one peak demand near April 15th even though system utilization is much lower for the most part of the year.